The articles and essays in this blog range from the short to the long. Many of the posts are also introductory (i.e., educational) in nature; though, even when introductory, they still include additional commentary. Older material (dating back mainly to 2005) is being added to this blog over time.

Monday, 20 July 2015

Michael Devitt on Analyticity & Conceptual Containment

Michael
Devitt tackles the frequently-used

“All
bachelors and unmarried men.”

example
as an ostensible case of a priori knowledge. This time,
however, instead of talking about ‘synonyms’, ‘meanings’ or
'mutual definitions’, he talks in terms of concepts. In fact his
statement of the case has a Kantian ring to it. He says that “the
content of the concept [bachelor] ‘includes’ that of the concept
[unmarried]”. Kant, though, talked of conceptual ‘containment’
rather than inclusion. And, as Quine told us about the Kantian
metaphor ‘contained’, the word ‘includes’ is also difficult.

How
does one concept ([bachelor]) contain or include another
([unmarried])?Anyway, because these concepts are seen this way, the
above is taken to be an analytic statement or taken as being known to
be true a priori.

Devitt
puts his own slant on this well-known example of an analytic
statement. He claims that others believed that

“simply
in virtue of having a concept, a person was in possession of a 'tacit
theory' about the concept; in virtue of having [bachelor], a person
tacitly knew that its content included that of [unmarried]”.

We
can say that if a person were asked for a definition of the word
‘bachelor’, he would say that “a bachelor is an unmarried man”.
However, because his theory is tacit, he doesn't vocalise (or even
sub-vocalise) that definition every time he uses the word ‘bachelor’
– perhaps he's never done so. Though when asked, he could indeed
do so. We can assume that simply having heard - and then known - the
definition, then that's enough for such tacit knowledge. Of course
because it's tacit, he almost certainly wouldn’t talk about
“conceptual containment” or one concept being contained within
another. Perhaps his only technical knowledge would be definitional.

The
former a priori explication of these concepts and the a
priori statement above are seen as Cartesian by Devitt. We have a
“privileged 'Cartesian' access to the facts about [such] concepts”.
Presumably this must mean that we need no experience of concept-use
and we certainly don’t need to check a dictionary. The only thing
that's required is

“a
reflective process of inspecting the contents of concepts to yield
knowledge of the relations between them which in turn yield such
knowledge as that all bachelors are unmarried”.

This
is odd to those of us who see concepts as themselves (often) being
the contents of statements or mental states. Concepts are often seen
as being pretty primitive and therefore suitable candidates for the
contents of various things. On this picture, concepts themselves have
content. Thus:

The
content of the concept [bachelor] is the concept [unmarried man].

Does
that mean that a concept, qua content, contains another
concept? Thus we would have:

[
bachelor [unmarried man]] or [unmarried man [bachelor]]

All
this also went under the name of “conceptual analysis” and was
similarly seen as an a priori process. Indeed at one point,
because of the importance of conceptual analysis in philosophy (at
least at one time), it was often stressed that philosophy itself was
an essentially a priori business. Either that, or it was a way
of stressing the already-taken-for-granted view that philosophy is an
a priori business. (Some philosophers still believe that
conceptual analysis is the primary role of a philosopher. Thus that
philosophers are basically apriorists.)

Devitt
also brings in the epistemic notion of justification. This seems a
little out of place, prima facie, when it comes to the
statement “All bachelors are unmarried men”. However, we're
talking about a priori justification here. He asks us if we
can justify the “proposition that all unmarrieds are unmarried were
justified” (6). Well, of course it is – isn’t it? What we have
here is the Quinian reduction of the analytic truth

“All
bachelors are unmarried men.”

into
the logical truth

“All
unmarried men are unmarried.”

by
the “substitution of synonym for synonym”. Again it seems, prima
facie, like an odd question to ask “where does the
justification for this proposition come from?” (6). Of course it's
justified… Well, if it isn’t exactly justified, that’s because
it doesn’t need to be because it's a logical truth. However, the
apriorist has previously said that the statement “All bachelors are
unmarried men” is known to be true a priori and therefore
it's also justified a priori. Now it seems it doesn’t
require epistemic justification because it's a disguised logical
truth.

The
obvious question now follows (asked earlier in Devitt’s paper):
What justifies logical truths? This question wasn’t asked
much until fairly recently in either philosophy or logic. Though if
the analytic truth is a disguised logical truth (even though it was
classed as a priori justified), then “we have not described
a nonempirical way of knowing” (6) precisely because the apriorist
has shifted (if he has shifted) from an analytic statement justified
to be true a priori to a logical truth which hasn't received
such a justification.